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[tv] Down with dark: why screen drama needs to lighten up … ‘Then there is The Good Wife, an ongoing example of fine, female-led drama (see also the much underrated Nurse Jackie) providing an antidote to the overwhelmingly morbid maleness of longform drama (that said, lead character Alicia Florrick has been compared to Walter White). There’s a great scene in the series, as yet unbroadcast in the UK – an ongoing joke about an intense cable drama Alicia occasionally watches. It features a soliloquising male, naked torso lit only by a flickering strobe, about to enjoy some action with a scantily clad female but existentially disdainful of it. “Sex… is a chimera,” he intones. “I saw a crack whore eat her own arm. I saw a baby drown like a cat. Sex… keeps us occupied because reality can’t be endured. Even this will end in smoke.” There is Dark in a nutshell, in all its ball-aching, sexist prattishness.’